The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750. Vol. 2, Queer Articulations (review)

{ 240 } Book Reviews \ \ The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750. Vol. 2, Queer Articulations. By Thomas Alan King. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. xxv + 583 pp. $65.00 cloth. In Queer Articulations, the companion study to his groundbreaking 2004 work The English Phallus, Thomas A. King continues his critique of those scholars of modern sexuality who desire to reinscribe modern subjectivities and sexualities onto bodies of individuals whose possible performances of self were limited by the degree to which they were subject to another’s power. The scope of this study is the long eighteenth century, the period from 1600 to 1750, during which male-­and female-­ bodied individuals transitioned from an erotic economy based on “pederasty, favoritism and patronage,” in which “penetration did not simply reflect or express subjection but was a performative vehicle for achieving social mobility and access to more powerful male and female bodies ”(xi–xii), to possession of a private subjectivity based in gender complementariness and heteronormativity. It is during this period, according to King, that adult males became gendered as a class of men. King’s first volume detailed the transition to a gendered subjectivity through the development of the private individual. Queer Articulations examines how what King terms “residual pederasty”—erotic behaviors based on public status, which continued to be performed alongside erotic behaviors based in a developing private gendered complementariness—became coded as negative due to the trace of pederastic subjection. In this volume, King takes great care to show how the public performance of pederastic subjection, behaviors that had previously denoted manliness across an entire society and increased one’s status as a result of intimate relations with and proximity to more powerful public bodies , over time became viewed as aristocratic, effeminate, and, finally, morally corrupt. In each of his five chapters, King investigates different “queer articulations ” that operate in resistance to the development of private subjectivity and gender complementariness. Chapter 1, “Performing ‘Akimbo,’” provides a genealogy of behavior and bodily comportment. It traces how a bodily comportment based in humanist“universals”that started as indicative of the public display of royal power and prestige became associated through the long eighteenth century with sodomy and a lack of a private selfhood, finally becoming reduced to a stereotype of modern homosexual identity. In chapter 2,“Mollies Privacies,” King traces the behaviors associated with “residual pederasty”and the queering of effeminate sodomites as“mollies.”Ac- { 241 } Book Reviews cording to King, this queering is a result of “the relocation both in discursive and in concrete and specifically urban social spaces of a wide array of residual and resistant practices and their resignification as properties of ‘mollies’” (141). He details the ways that “mollies” were denied a private subjectivity by those who sought to define relationships based in emerging gender complementariness as the only relationships based in affect. He reveals how, over the long eighteenth century, the definition of sodomy shifted from any non-­ procreative act to anal penetration, with a corresponding shift in law from the prosecution of a behavior to the criminalizing of an identity, the “sodomite.” Chapter 3, “The Canting Queen,” examines the use of the theatre to produce , as well as to represent, bodily styles and comportment. This chapter examines in great depth the cult of the “beautiful boy” and the use of cross-­ dressed boy players within an economy of pederastic desire. King also explores the representation of the aristocratic body as “foppish,” a hybrid characteri­ za­ tion with its vocal style based on the high-­ pitched aristocratic cant and its bodily comportment based in colloquial rhetorical styles. He does all this in an examination of Colly Cibber’s 1740 “Apology,” in which Cibber “rejected the possibility that boys had been credible in female roles”(235). King unpacks this statement as an articulation of an ideology that advocated the use of women onstage, under the guise of “realism,” in an effort to normalize gender complementariness and reject “residual pederasty” that threatened its claim of “naturalness .” In chapter 4, “How (Not) to Queer Boswell,” King provides an extended critique of the trend in Boswell studies to hold him up as an example of a homosexual subjectivity. King asserts instead that...